Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(80)

She went on for a while, letting the resentment out, but she didn’t kill Hemming, Virgil thought.

As he was leaving he asked, “You walked out of Gina’s house with David Birkmann, right?”

“Yes.” She smiled. “Dave’s the only exterminator around Trippton, and we had a rat problem at the factory—don’t tell anyone that I told you. The big boss was complaining about the bill for cleaning the place up, and Dave looked her in the eye and said if she was really not satisfied, he could return her rats . . . which I thought was funny, knowing the boss. If a rat ever showed up in her office, she’d have been climbing up the chandelier, screaming her head off.”

“Somebody told me that Dave Birkmann had been in love with Gina,” Virgil said.

Carver narrowed her eyes. “I can see that. Dave’s family goes back a long time in Trippton—his grandfather had a farm up above the bluffs and his father owned the extermination business, before he died and David inherited it. I think David always identified with the kids whose parents ran the town—but, you know, his father was an exterminator. That’s not like being a doctor or a lawyer or a minister or a banker. I think . . . I dunno . . . I like him. He’s a good guy . . . He might have yearned for her . . . but I don’t think he’d ever do anything about it.”

“How about the Cheevers?”

“Good people, too, as long as you’re not standing between them and something they want. Lucy is polite to everyone, and I think she’s real about that. She’s polite because that’s nice and it makes people happy, and she wants to do that.”

“But you wouldn’t want to stand between them and something they wanted.”

“No. No, I wouldn’t. Elroy could sell ice to Eskimos, but it’s Lucy who’s really got the hard nose. If the Eskimos didn’t buy the ice, she’d slit their throats.”

“In a nice way.”

“Oh, yeah. They’d all be smiling while she did it.”

Another question occurred to him. “Of all the people at the meeting, who do you think would have the worst temper? You know, who’d really go off on somebody?”

She had to work that around in her head for a moment, then said, “Well . . . Gina.”

“Who’d be next?”

More thought. “Probably . . . Margot Moore. Or Lucy. Maybe Ryan, in a doctor way. An impatient way.”

—

Virgil said good-bye and headed for the exit, but Carver grabbed her sweater and caught him in the hallway. “I knew you’d come to see me, but I wondered if you had a thought . . .”

“Like what?”

She said, “You think Margot was killed by the same person who killed Gina, correct?”

“Yes.”

“What if Margot was killed by somebody who knew that Margot had killed Gina? Margot and Gina were friends, but it wasn’t always lovey-dovey. Ask around, you’ll find out.”

“But why wouldn’t they come to me and tell me about it instead of killing Margot?”

“This is Trippton, Virgil,” Carver said. “We’re so far away from everything that we’re used to handling our own problems. If somebody who loved Gina knew something about Margot . . . it could happen. You need to find out who doesn’t have an alibi for killing Margot.”

—

Virgil went out to his truck, deciding on his way that he didn’t believe that. He couldn’t believe it. If Margot had killed Gina, and Fred Fitzgerald came along and dumped the body, and somebody else killed Margot out of revenge, he was screwed. He’d never get to the bottom of this.





TWENTY-FOUR The day was getting old, and Virgil felt like he’d been running in circles. What he needed more than anything, he thought, was a couple hours of absolute silence so he could sort out everything he knew about the two killings.

Jenkins called and asked if they were still on for dinner. Virgil suggested the steak house at seven o’clock, and Jenkins said okay and added that Margaret Griffin had told them that she’d come up with a new idea for solving the Barbie doll problem but wouldn’t say what it was.

Johnson Johnson said he and Clarice would meet them at the steak house and also said that the arrest of Fred Fitzgerald, and the reason for it, was all over town. “That boy’s gonna have to pack up and leave,” Johnson said.

Virgil drove back to the cabin and, on the way, called Griffin and, when she answered, asked what she was up to. “What I should have done a week ago: find the sleaziest people who might know about the Barbie doll makers and do a reverse auction—five hundred dollars for information, payable upon delivery of results. No? Six hundred dollars? No? A thousand dollars? No? Two thousand? I’ll go to five grand, if I have to. Somewhere between five hundred and five thousand, I’ll find my Judas. There’s at least a few in every town.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“Any goddamn way I can.”

“Good luck with that,” Virgil said.

The thought that she was right about finding a Judas—and she probably was—was moderately depressing, though Virgil himself had relied on more than one dirtball informant.

—

At the cabin, Virgil got out a legal pad, listed all the people at the reunion meeting, and a few more—Justin/Justine’s boyfriend, Marvin Hiners at the bank—and started writing down what he knew as facts about them. When he was done, he flipped through the pages, looking for connections. He didn’t find anything particularly convincing.